American Circus

Athenians, as they built up their superlative direct democracy, starting with Solon, attached extreme importance to isegoria (or isogeria), the equality of every citizen in addressing the National Assembly. That ought to have been daunting: Athens did not have the Internet.

Imprinting the weak and meek to do their job, with enthusiasm, without any whining, and go around the mighty, eyes down, praising the great, is how plutocrats want them. In the USA, it’s a total success. Who would have thought, in a country that used to be rebellious, and where the event of May 1, long ago, started the workers’ May First tradition, worldwide… except where it originated. What better symbol of the subjugation of the citizens of the USA?

Here is what taxes are used for:

Plutocratic Salaries Tell The Rabble What Values Are Worthy

[These are the highest paid state employee in every state.] Sport apes are paid fortunes. The brother of Michelle Obama is paid about 20 times the family income, just to coach ball to youngsters.

More than 41 of the 50 states’ highest paid public employees are sport trainers. Either state university’s football (27), state basketball (13) or state hockey (1) programs. The remaining 10 hyper wealthy public paid propagandists are either college presidents, medical school/law school deans or a plastic surgeon in the medical school (Nevada).

Tapping a ball for a college can earn more than 4 million dollar a year in salary in the USA. But then, 50 million USA citizens go without health care. (Obama will change that by fining the poor he can catch, thanks to the IRS, CIA, NSA, or whatever secret organization at his disposal, and the money will go directly to his gorilla of a hyper wealthy, ball jerking brother in law. All Americans respect this very much, and I just made 100 millions dedicated enemies, writing this, and it will be called “racist”. Well, I welcome their hatred, as FDR said.)

This indifference to isegoria is why and how Obamacare was, and could be, planned in secret, behind closed doors. That indifference has been imprinted too.

This indifference to public debate is also how and why the minimum salary, in the USA, over the last few decades, went down, from $22 an hour to around $8. (I am using constant 2014 dollars.)

That’s a diminution of two-thirds. Much had to do with the Progressives being unwilling to progress (and focusing instead on not calling greedy apes… greedy apes).

Paul Krugman in the “War Over Poverty”, observes that “Suddenly, or so it seems, progressives have stopped apologizing for their efforts on behalf of the poor, and have started trumpeting them instead. And conservatives find themselves on the defensive.”

Let’s hope that sticks. It would represent a change of mood. One of the reason that the holocaust of the Jews happened was the weak, meek, pleading, reasonable, subservient attitude of Jews, when Hitler rolled around.

Compare with France during the Dreyfus Affair: a full intellectual civil war was conducted with unrelenting ferocity on the part of intellectual progressives, against the “Jew” haters. Zola made it so that he went to jail, for about a year. And came out as a winner (although he died of carbon monoxide poisoning soon after, in an accident).

Progressive intellectuals fight for truth. French intellectuals, during the Dreyfus Affair, knew all too well that, if they did not fight for innocent Jews, their friends, acquaintances, and fellow citizens, and if they did not fight for veracity, equity and justice, other innocents would soon be attacked.

So how come the situation of the poor has evolved the way it did in the USA? It was done insensibly, just as the inception of slavery, after 1620, in violation of European and English law, was done insensibly.

Surely the powerful, supposedly “liberal” media in the USA could have denounced the increasing push towards making the poor, poorer? Governor Brown in California, thanks to new taxes on the rich, sees the coffers of the state filling up 20% higher than expected, and the highest budget ever (109 billion dollars). Surely he will reverse the school cuts? No word on that yet.

One of the causes of the increasing inequality in the USA is simply that those who control public opinion in the USA, are, in general, very wealthy, or sympathetic to wealth.

Thus is carefully nurtured a strong pro-plutocratic bias in the media.

Thanks to all these media owners, managers, pundits, and celebrities. All of them extravagantly rich.

This is why the likes of Oprah Winfrey make billions: it’s not about the market working its wonders. After all, Ms. Big Chest’s career was decided by higher ups, just as higher ups bought the plutophile Huffington Post to make it more than way, earning Ms. Huffington one cool billion in the process…

These avalanches of wealth bring to the fore preachers of the grandeur of whatever it is that has nothing to do with the war on poverty. Those who interface with the Public are made hyper rich so that they will have solidarity with the hyper rich who paid them, or pay them, or endow them with power. Hyper rich media talking heads are like living adverts for the plutocracy and all the Dark values it stands on.

This is why Oprah Winfrey knows how to make the USA cry about that fact she could not buy in Zurich that 45,000 dollar bag, or the entire store, instantaneously, as she wanted, or not.

Or this is why Oprah Winfrey made the world cry because the employees of Hermes Paris insulted her by opening the store after hour, just for her, at her strident request, with a je ne sais quoi of intolerable Gallic insolence.

The Oprah opera is carefully tuned to make all Americans feel the pain of plutocrats. Especially when the plutocrats are confronted to the lowest salaried employees they can find, as Oprah was in Zurich and Paris.

That same effect, the total molding of public opinion by the owners of a country, is characteristic of all and any banana republics. It makes it unlikely that a civilized debate will get society out of the plutocratic comfort zone. Thus, insensibly, inequality and poverty augment.

That is, as long as the poor do not use the only remedy that works in a case like that: violence. That is why the French Revolution of 1789 had to use violence (and so did the American Revolution, a bit earlier: the only way to release Pennsylvania from Lord Penn’s grip, was the hard way, he was not going to be talked into it).

Pay attention to this: plutocracy can buy the People. The case of Rome show an alarming point: welfare programs can comfort plutocratization.

We The People get paid, just like prostitutes get paid. With a difference: prostitutes, generally, have a choice, but We The People seized at the throat by plutocracy, do not.

In Rome, the method of paying the People with panem, circenses et alimenti (bread, entertainment, food stamps) was inaugurated. Even the wondrous public baths could be accessed with one of the lowest domination coins, and distributions of money by potentates occurred.

To be elected, a would-be politician organized games (Cicero spurned the method, and could not afford it anyway, but he was Rome’s most gifted orator).

In the USA, something similar is already going on. Consider the link provided by John Rogers, a commenter on this site. Public money is used to organize the games, and the management is paid directly from the public purse, when not indirectly through the plutocratic university system.

Robinson, the elder brother of Michelle Obama, got a six-year contract with a base salary of $750,000 at Oregon State, the Oregonian reported in 2008. By sheer coincidence Obama, his brother in law, was elected president.

The same wonderful sort of coincidence had made Michelle Obama a director of companies, and a highly paid hospital administrator, in charge of community outreach (same as Oprah Winfrey!), just when her husband became USA senator.

Oregon State is a public university. This is just about guys playing with a ball instead of studying. It works well: Robinson himself, a 6 foot six basket ball player, went to Princeton University to play ball. After he had done that, he was given a MBA, and became a big time investment banker.

The prime qualifications for that is to be a unknowing brute with no wisdom or ethics whatsoever. Throwing balls through hoops in a way of education helps that way. Probably one’s brain is all messed up from all the shocks. Next, one can smoke pot for years, like Obama’s Choom Gang, and one is dumb enough to spend one’s life being obeying orders from the white masters.

So Robinson made ten million dollars a year or so, following a career similar, but much more modest than Paulson ( a football player, who, once his brain got scrambled enough, became head of Goldman Sachs, and later, as Secretary of the Treasury under Bush, established the economic policy of Barack Obama, namely the rescue of banks, no strings attached!)

Paulson bought for himself an island, with seven villages on it. Somewhere in the USA. Obscene maniacs such as these would now have to pay 75% tax in France. Under President Eisenhower, it was 93%. Now, thanks to Obama’s 90,000 pages tax codes, they pay around nothing.

In general, all over the USA, the public purse is used to pay extravagantly for sport figures, and thus make children understand that being a brute is what pays. It works. At least, for plutocrats. For the poor too: they are getting poorer every year, and have been imprinted to be happy that way.

Conclusion: Nearly all of the USA’s culture, the media, and all what people obsess about, has been organized to create a society that is inimical to the poor, and thus, increasingly, to itself.

It’s going to take more than fighting the Republican party to get out of this circus.
What is needed is a radical change of philosophy.

As if to confirm everything you say (“. . . make children understand that being a brute is what pays”) a University of North Carolina professor is under attack (including apparently from her own University) and receiving death threats for her study finding that 60% of their athletes read at less than an 8th grade level, and 10% at less than a 3rd grade level.

Excellent John! Thanks again, you are a gold mine. I can/ought to use that in a follow-up essay. That universities make these their star programs make clear what their main mission is supposed to be: hypnotization, not instruction.
PA

By coincidence, this evening Jean and I watched the documentary film Heist. I’m sure you, Patrice, and many others, have seen it. The film underlines the terrible consequences of the Reagan years and later Presidencies. Going to write a post on LfD later this week.

Paul: Never even heard of “Heist”… But sure enough, there was a heist, and it’s still on. I am all ears and eyes to instruct myself… It’s true that Reagan was a watershed. I thought people would revolt, but they embraced the madness, drank the coolaid, and went further (see the Iraq invasion insanity: now, even to the fanatics, it does not look so hot…).
PA

Indeed. For example the New York Times tried to “expire” my subscription and both censors, or delays my comments systematically. I have, in emails, direct statements that this policy is deliberate. I used a lawyer to get reinstated.
The NYT calls me “unverified” although I have had a full subscription at the same street address for decades. The Huffington post published just 8 (innocuous) comments of mine, years ago, before putting me on a no posting list, and so on…
Amusingly the WSj and The Economist have never censored me…
Why?
Because much of the official “liberal media” in the USA is fake. They pose as opposed, but are part of the establishment, and that has to be hidden.
PA

Thanks Roger! At the New York Times, somebody called “Ape” sent an email to “expire” my fully paid subscription. My lawyer asked to be sent that email, we are still waiting… That they call be me “unverified” after I sent them more than $20,000 over the years from the same street address is pretty telling.
BTW, speaking of “ape”, what you sent about illiterate apes in sport is fascinating, thanks. It reflects my own experience in USA universities. I’m going to mention it in a small essay (if I find time!)
PA

Is the USA a racial democracy? Certainly racial: black Americans are six times more likely to be incarcerated. Moreover, the USA is the number one incarcerating country in the world (!), making the USA the world’s prison state per excellence.

The racial problem of the USA is a core of evil in an ocean of violence.

Third, and it’s related, the USA is not a democracy: plutocrats, corporations and their agents, the so called “representatives”, rule, not We The People. In Athens, decisions required at least 8% of the population to vote to reach a quorum.

The Roman republic was much more democratic (although it did not claim to have a democratic constitution, but a “mixed” one!). Athens was a real (direct) democracy. Having 300 millions subjugated by less than 1,000 officials is no democracy. Race is distraction, an obsession that incite people to lose sight of the real problem.

another excellent post, thank you P.A.. just want to add; the system is not broken, it was built this way. one cannot simply ‘fix’ the system…it must be replaced, by the people, for the people–once again…..

We entirely agree. Lafayette spent many summers trying to persuade his dear friend Washington to strike slavery down. George did not say no, George said his friend’s feelings were admirable, but he did not do anything about it.

The Founding Fathers were slave masters, Indian killers and speculators. They built a republic allowing all this to proceed. This is how the USA came to be. All right. Now it’s time to transcend all this.

The Constitution OUGHT to be changed. Start by requiring the election of the president by We The People. That’s a nothing thing, but what makes that important constitutional important is that it will break the ice. The ice of the USA Constitution frozen in its enslaving, homicidal GENESIS.
PA

Paul: You are so demanding! Where do you think we are? France? What’s next? Free healthcare? Do you want people not to be motivated by money anymore, and not rewarded when they crumble under it? Do you want to live under dear Chris Snuggs’ superstate? So socialist of you.
PA

A relevant detail: La Fayette was initially put in the brig by the king Louis XVI for helping American revolutionaries as a French officer, and being insolent about it to his face (Louis XVI’s spies and agents were doing that, but having an on-duty officer getting involved that way was a blatant act of war against Great Britain).

However, 20 years later or so, the now immensely prestigious general La Fayette was the head of the mighty French National Guard. He got the order, when the Revolution was running out of control, to fire on some demonstrators. He flatly refused, for ethical reasons.

The Revolution rolled on, under La Fayette’s benediction. The much smaller Swiss guard (2,000 strong or so) fired on the Public, and got massacred to the last.

So La Fayette talked the talk, and walked the walk.
G. Washington, admirable in many other ways, walked on the Dark Side.
PA

[…] is, by USA standards, the very definition of a socialist country. But, without fighting the American Circus, little can be done against global plutocracy. The USA pretty much behaves like a Den of Thieves. […]